


Debt the Shape of a Boy

by allthemilkbreads



Category: Haikyuu!!
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fantasy, Alternate Universe - Medieval, Angst with a Happy Ending, Edo Period, F/F, Fairy Tale Curses, I tagged this for descriptions of violence but it isn't very graphic, M/M, Minor Iwaizumi Hajime/Oikawa Tooru, Minor Shimizu Kiyoko/Yachi Hitoka, Minor Tsukishima Kei/Yamaguchi Tadashi, Samurai, Supernatural Elements
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-12-09
Updated: 2018-02-03
Packaged: 2019-02-12 09:24:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 9,262
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12956235
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/allthemilkbreads/pseuds/allthemilkbreads
Summary: “And so old Hinata Nishio laid waste to his enemy, and so the village Miyagi was cursed to cruel misfortune by the gods because the sacred code of bushido had been broken within it, and so a young boy whose grandfather’s name had been forced upon him and whose fault was not his but his ancestry’s was made to suffer. Fin.”“Fin?”“Fin, as in, like, it’s finished. It’s over; that’s the story.”“That’s it, huh? Forced to endure a curse for forever, destined to be an outcast. Is that what I am?”“I don’t think so, but you seem to.”Hinata casts his eyes downward and pulls his lower lip into his mouth. “History thinks so.”---Hinata Shouyou has been having dreams for a few months now, hauntingly detailed visions of a boy he has never spoken to but who lives in his village, a boy with ocean eyes and hair of ink. Every night, Hinata watches Kageyama Tobio die in his dreams, and every day he wakes to a commoner's lifestyle and the curse of his family looming over him. At least, that's how it has been, until even stranger things begin happening, and Hinata begins thinking that maybe there's more to history than what's written, and more to honor than what meets the eye.





	1. Beginnings

**Author's Note:**

> Please note: This story will won't end in tragedy, but there are elements of violence and death throughout. As mentioned in the tags, there are no graphic descriptions of these things, but please take care of yourself by not reading this fic if you think those elements will be triggering for you.

The town square, usually garishly colorful and raucous and alive, is silent when Hinata steps into it. He watches his footfalls carefully, feeling the smooth chill through a layer of worn-out socks, observing the way his heels dip into the crevices and bump over the curves of the road, delicately touching his toes to the earth first and then lowering the rest of his foot in what might look to a spectator as a practiced dance to a silent song.

It is not a dance; it is a distraction technique. 

There are shadowed figures surrounding him, he is aware, and they whisper, but it is silent still. Their sounds whistle away into the wind, choked into nothingness as soon as they hit the air. Hinata knows if he looks at them he will see faces etched into concern, mouths puckering around words of false distress, yet he does not look at them; he does not acknowledge them. This is a story he has starred in many times before. 

He keeps walking, with measured steps and measured breaths, and when the streets begin to wind and twist away from the square, his feet do not falter in tracing the correct path. Hinata knows exactly where he is going, because he passes by these streets in his waking hours, and he traces this same route every night in his dreams. After a few minutes (time is always distorted without the constrictions of the waking world, but Hinata recognizes it has been a few minutes because the knowledge rushes into him headfirst, the way all realizations do in dreams), the cobblestone path opens back up again. 

There is a well, perched on a slab of stone, dry as bone, parched as the rice fields lining the town. Hinata winces, a full-body flinch, his limbs twitching as they resist the existence of this place in itself, but he is a marionette with strings taut, holding him in place. He does not want to see it, but his eyes flick towards the well anyways and hold their gaze there, wavering but persistent.

There is a boy standing on the rim of the well, barefoot and streaked with mud, his back to Hinata. His yukata, untied, hangs limp in the now-windless air. He turns his head, and Hinata sees a flash of blue eyes, dark hair falling in choppy sections across his forehead and curling at the nape of his neck. The boy jumps. Hinata does not wait around to hear the sound of his body breaking.  
Every night, Hinata watches Tobio die, and every day he watches him go about his life, looking through the smaller boy without a flicker of recognition or even acknowledgment. 

___

Hinata wakes with a start, as he does every night, sweat drying across his brow and hand still outstretched as though he hoped to catch the boy in the dream before he fell. He lowers his hand, relaxing it bit by bit until it lays flaccid again on the bed dressings. The mattress sighs as the rest of his body slumps into it as well. He lays, breathing labored, and he waits for a minute before he smells it; the damp musk that hung heavy in his dream now floods the stale air of his bedroom. He is sure his bedroom did not reek of this smell before. Still, it does not surprise Hinata. 

This is all routine to him now: wake up from scarring nightmare, prepare for the day, go to work in the rice fields, visit the apothecary if necessary, rinse…. and repeat. Every day, Hinata follows a commoner’s routine, and every night a piece of his dream follows him into the waking world. 

Today it is the smell—an oily, thick odor that curls itself around him unpleasantly. Yesterday, he woke to a drenched bed, as though all the water not in the well had found its way to him. Months before, the neighbors had begun to suspect he was sexually promiscuous, for all the pieces of yukata and obi that had appeared in his bed night after night that he had to keep disposing of. (Sometimes the clothes would sit crumpled into a corner of his room for days at a time as he deliberated on gifting them to Yamaguchi, the gleam of their silk trimmings glaring at him from where they laid, but in the end he always threw them in the sea before a week had passed.) He thinks eventually the dream must run out of ways to remind him of its existence, but so far it has not failed.

Hinata throws open his shutters to rid his room of the smell. 

\---

The apothecary is still open when Hinata gets there, its light warm and welcoming as it spills out onto the doorstep. It’s well past closing hours, the business’ sign long flipped over to ‘Closed,’ (complete with a doodled cartoon of a frowning face—Yamaguchi’s work, he’s sure) but Hinata hears shuffling and a muffled bout of profanity, followed by the sound of glass shattering and a much more passionate bout of profanity, and that can only mean one thing.

Yamaguchi’s home. 

The shop is as disorganized as expected when Hinata steps into it, and it takes a great deal of maneuvering to get within sight of Yamaguchi. There are bits and bobs everywhere one would not expect them—a stray flask here, a crumpled medical diagram there, a collection of plants growing out of vases and mugs and the rafters in some places, and it lends a fantastical atmosphere to the space. This is a place that is not to be taken lightly. The dim lanterns do wonders for the mood, but they do no favors for Hinata’s clumsy nature; he does not see an entire shelf of cacti until his nose is brushing their spines. 

This is the place that Hinata most regards as home, and he longs to see its owner. 

The boy in question is hovering over a table when he comes within eyesight, fingers of one hand brushing over a dusty tome with great precision, fingers of the other copying down the words as he scans them. His mouth moves in tandem with his fingers as they trace sentences across yellowed pages, lips forming words that are too quiet to pick up.

Yamaguchi. 

Hinata startles when the apothecary speaks, before remembering the commotion he must have made whilst navigating the store, and that it is really no surprise that Yamaguchi was expecting him. 

“How was work?” 

Yamaguchi’s back is still facing Hinata when he addresses him, but the movement of his fingers stills on the book and the scratch of his pencil stops. 

“Forget that! How was the mainland? Did you manage to get us some food? Were the people nice? Was the blonde guy you talk about there? Oh, oh, did you see the pink trees?”  
Hinata clamps down on his lower lip after that, half to keep more words from spilling out and half in anticipation of the answer. 

“The mainland folk were accommodating enough.” There is a small quirk to the shopkeeper’s lips when he turns to face Hinata. “I never did learn how to properly wear their clothes though. They give me these things every time I go, like they can’t bear to see me in my workman’s clothes or something, and the things have all these ties and folds in them that are impossible to figure out. I always give the clothes back to them at the end of my visit anyways; I would have no use for them here. The, um, yes, the blonde guy. Yes, he was there. And the sakura, Hinata, not the “pink trees”, were not in bloom. The weather conditions weren’t fitting. Maybe next time.”

Hinata feels his expression crumple. 

“Next time. So there will be a next time. They didn’t give us enough food to make up for this year’s harvest. And it’s already decided that you’ll be the one sent again?”

“There are provisions sufficient to last through the winter. We have enough if we ration. They had an overabundance of buckwheat this harvest, so now we have lots of that. (More soba, Hinata thought miserably. As though there wasn’t enough soba.) And no one’s decided anything. I chose to go, and I will choose to go again when our supplies aren’t adequate. It’s my responsibility to this town to be a diplomat.”

“But you’re gone for months at a time! There must be a better way! How do you think we cope, not even knowing if you’re ever even coming back? How would we fare if we lost you? Who would read and write for us, who would heal our injured, who would cure our ugliest illnesses? And all for what? Some pretty mainland boy who pitches his “K’s” higher when he pronounces them? Some nice clothes, some pretty sights, some sense of importance?” 

Yamaguchi’s face flushes in anger, his posture locking up defensively, and Hinata knows he has pushed too far but he finds he cannot take the words back. When Yamaguchi speaks, it is quiet and raw, his voice breaking over the words.

“There is none of that where I go.”

The door slams behind Hinata as he leaves, the final page of the book of how tonight’s reunion went terribly, terribly wrong. And yet he cannot take back the words he had thrust at Yamaguchi, because they are true. 

\---

There is a tangible absence that tugs on Hinata’s soul on the walk home. Usually, Yamaguchi would persuade him be walked back around this time, probably after at least two cups of scalding herb tea had already been downed, its taste putrid but Hinata too fond of its maker to refuse. Tonight, there is not the comforting burn in the back of his throat as he makes his way home, and his side feels cold without the press of a warm body against it. 

Everything feels cold. The press of winter has already begun to set in, the icy hand of September clamping down on the back of Hinata’s neck and its wind winnowing through his clothes mercilessly. The harvest season for the rice fields will end soon, and he’ll have to find new work. 

There are few people in the streets as he makes his way back home; he sees a group of drunkards stumbling along, hands slipping over walls as they struggle to recapture their balance and fail, but they are too far away to notice him. There is a woman standing in a doorway, shushing a baby’s cries, shadows falling over her and shrouding her entire figure, but she takes no notice of him as well (or she chooses to not acknowledge him, he does not know.) A man with deep lines etched in his brow jostles Hinata’s shoulder as he brushes past, the contact sudden and unforgiving, and Hinata waits for the careless apology that would usually follow, but he gets averted eyes and a beneath-the-breath slur instead. 

This is routine, uncomfortable but consistent. 

His bed is scratchy as he falls into it, but no less appreciated for it. 

\---

That night, Hinata dreams of the sea. 

It is a flat, blue expanse, stretching in either direction until it curves away at the horizon, dotted in some areas with flocks of gulls or fishermen’s vessels. He’s atop some rock cropping, the waves flicking their tongues against its sides but never touching him. The air is salty, stinging the roof of his mouth as he gulps it in. He knows where he stands, a few miles off the coast of his village Miyagi, because he has been here before. He used to find his way here in his childhood on nights when sleep evaded him, taking a small kayak across the waves until he reached this place, where the stars seemed so big and clear that if he reached up he might be touch them. 

Tonight, he can see no stars. 

There is just this black spot in the center of his vision that becomes more defined if he squints, and he narrows his eyes more and more until they are slits, gazing with intent into this patch of now-opaque nothingness that mars the seascape. 

The ocean and the sky blend into one navy nonexistence the more he squints his eyes, until his vision is rimmed in black, interrupted by white clouds. There is a startling blue, black again in the center.  
Hinata realizes a great fundamental truth all at once: he is staring into the great center of an eye, one he sees every night, and he knows how this dream will end. Tonight is no different. Tonight he does not dream of the sea, but of Tobio’s eyes, the moment before he jumps. 

There is the town square. There are whispers; he cannot hear their words. There is a yukata. There is black hair, inky dark at the base of his neck. There are ocean eyes. Hinata is watching him fall.


	2. Of Rain and Regret

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please note: This story will won't end in tragedy, but there are elements of violence and death throughout. As mentioned in the tags, there are no graphic descriptions of these things, but please take care of yourself by not reading this fic if you think those elements will be triggering for you. 
> 
> As always, enjoy, and I'll see you at the bottom.

Hinata wakes with the taste of language on his tongue.

_“Ka.”_

It is all that the dream gives him today, just this sound moving across his lips, forcing its way out of them. He repeats the sound out loud a few times just for good measure, to get that feeling of something stuck in his throat to lessen. He throws an arm haphazardly out to the side, too groggy still to actually get up and search through his night-table’s drawers. Instead, he finds them by touch, groping across the splintered wood of the furniture until his hand lands on paper.

It takes him a few tries to write the Hiragana legibly, and even longer to rewrite the entire name as he knows it in a neat script. He has five characters now, bits and pieces of words the dream has given him over a span of many months. He began to suspect the sounds spelled out a name after the second time he woke up writhing in his bed with a noise ripping out of his throat, and when the grunts and hums fit together to complete the name “Tobio,” he knew what it meant.

(He wonders, sometimes, if Tobio dreams up pieces of him as well.)

He had gone to Yamaguchi the first time it happened; as the only resident of Miyagi he knew who was proficient in reading and writing, the apothecary was the closest Hinata had to an expert on these things. Yamaguchi had spent months on the mainland in his childhood, slaving over the curves of characters, and the fruits of his knowledge was the high regard the rest of the townsfolk held him in. Hinata used to hold him in the highest respect of them all, and so he struggled through weeks of lessons and broken writing instruments until he could spell out his own name, and the names of the crops he helped cultivate regularly, and finally the name of the boy he was fated to watch suffer.

“Tobio Kageya” was still an incomplete name, but at least it was something.

\---

Hinata is carrying water from the well to the rice fields when it happens.

First, there comes an unsettling chorus of birdsong—background music to the sight of hundreds of bird taking to the air—minutes before the first smattering of raindrops streak down from the sky. The water bounces off the bridge of Hinata’s nose, disrupting the surface of the water in the pail he grips, and he catches a few of the droplets of his lips. They taste like a sweet nihility, a far cry from the salty, bitter taste of poorly-purified seawater.

It is the best thing Hinata’s tasted in months.

He swings himself around, laughing purposelessly, dragging the bucket behind him and letting its weight pull him to and fro. The well-water sloshes over the rim of the container, but Hinata pays it no mind; it does not compare to what is falling from the sky anyways.

It has not rained in so very long (just another way the earth bullies and batters the town as punishment for crimes it has not committed).

Hinata finishes up in the fields as quickly as possible, throwing his sedge hat and scythe in the general direction of the landowner’s house, the bags of harvested grain following soon after. The water has begun to pool unpleasantly around his legs at this point, sucking his boots into the mud and releasing them with wet _pops_ as he waddles along. He is grateful when he reaches the end of the fields, quickly exchanging the soaked haori and shoes for his own muddied kimono and zori right where he stands on the outskirts of the paddies. The rain guarantees him his modesty; no one in their right mind would come searching for him now, not in this weather, not when they could be singing in the square or writing their relatives or warm-bellied with beer. Hinata plans to do some variation of all three within the next hour, but first Yamaguchi must be found. And, well, Yamaguchi was impossible to lose in the first place.

 ---

The town is alive when Hinata steps into it, its people infected by a pressing sense of restlessness washed in with the rain that manifests itself in feet tapping on the floor and fingers drumming on table and poorly-whispered conversations in street corners. It’s a quiet chaos, but chaos all the same. Children giggle from doorways when he passes them, and for once it is laughter born not at his expense but from their delight. Hinata has to remind himself that this is most probably a new spectacle for them, much as seeing white powder fall from the heavens during a trip to the mountains was for him. _Their enchantment is justified,_ he reminds himself again and again. _This means a different thing to them than it ever will to me_.

He finds no comfort in the words. For them, this is only the joy of a forgotten coastal village that is seeing its first rain in the better part of two years. For Hinata, it is a reminder.

(Some might assume that any kind of coastal settlement is prone to a lot more of rain, but Miyagi is a special kind of coastal settlement with a special brand of misfortune, so most regular assumptions cannot be extended to it.) 

Hinata sees, on his short walk to the tavern, many things, none of them fulfilling in the way he supposes they should be: there is money changing hands among people who had nothing better to bet on than the next rainfall, there are buckets and pails and bowls and anything that can be used to collect rainwater being hauled out into the streets, there are people peering out of windows with great surprise stretching their faces. A man stumbles outside to tilt his head to the heavens in great puzzlement. A woman outside a line of shops spreads her arms out, palms upward and eyes closed, letting the water tangle in her hair and speckle her cheeks and brow until it runs down her neck in rivulets and soaks the collar of her shirt. Hinata hears a whisper in the streets (whispers seem to follow him here; there is never a place free of whispers) echoing over and over among different groups of people but still asking the same things: “Is it finally over? Has our curse of misfortune finally been lifted? Has the plague of famine and drought and misery finally been cured?”

All of this is not his concern.

\---

Hinata enters the tavern with as much a false air of confidence as he can muster upon command, which is admittedly not much. Some of the customers tilt ruddy faces towards him as he enters, but they quickly go back to their drinks. The flash of a familiar black head of hair catches his eye as it whips around a corner, and then it is gone.

The bar itself is lively tonight, most of its people there to partake in the merrymaking the rain has invited. The workers are busier than they must’ve been in weeks, twirling amongst the chairs, laden with mugs of sake, stopping every few seconds to place a heavy glass on a table before continuing their dance. They, too, have been infected with spirit.

And Yamaguchi, well, he is shamelessly flirting with some bartender Hinata has seen but never talked to before, tripping over himself as he leans over the counter to breathe in the other’s air, slurring his words as he looks up through thick lashes at the man. Yamaguchi’s face is flushed impressively, but Hinata knows he is not drunk, just a convincing actor.

Yamaguchi only flirts with men when he’s drunk, or at least pretending to be. The apothecary is pretty, gentle when he wants to be, but smart all the same, sapient to the ways of the world, and if he was believed to be sober, he would lose status, respect, and freedom. As it is, it is considered entertaining to watch, if a little questionable of a practice; the townspeople brush it off as one of his many eccentricities, a small price to pay in return for his services.

The bartender, interestingly, waves Yamaguchi away when he’s practically folded himself over the counter, but does not reject his advances altogether. Hinata’s sure, if given enough time, the barkeeper would succumb to soft hazel eyes and a teasing smile.

Hinata clears his throat with obnoxious flair behind where Yamaguchi sits.

The man in question turns, eyes comically wide but lips still spit-slick and pouty from where he’s bitten at them, face caught between seduction and shock, ridiculous in his surprise. He pretends to stand dizzily, making a show of swaying as he grasps for a hold on Hinata’s yukata, but his eyes sober as the younger boy leads him to a quiet corner and orders two whiskies. (Hinata will not touch a drop of alcohol, hates the feeling of control slipping away from him, but he pretends one of them is for him nonetheless for appearances sake).

Yamaguchi holds the other under his gaze skillfully, as though knows something Hinata does not.

He probably does. He definitely does.

Yamaguchi asks, “Why not go sit with the others?” and he already knows the answer.

(Some days, Hinata wishes for an unintelligent friend, someone to call family and to huddle with on cold nights who will not leave him next harvest and not see through his every movement. Today is one of them.)

“I’m sorry.”

Yamaguchi raises a single, slender eyebrow.

“I’m sorry… for last night. It was not my place.” Hinata drops his gaze in a show of submission, hanging his head in a bad imitation of a bow and snapping it back up again when he hears a light chuckle.

Yamaguchi is gesticulating like a madman, in a motion that Hinata supposes means “don’t worry about it.”

“Water under the bridge,” he says instead. “We were both correct. I’ve already asked for any volunteers to assist me on the next voyage. ‘Should make the trip a little quicker, a little more bearable. Then you won’t be forced to endure so much time away from me anymore.” He punctuates this with an amused wink, and Hinata appreciates the sentiment if not the accompanying action.

Yamaguchi nudges at his shoulder, sends a pointed glance at a cluster of particularly raucous carousers, and repeats his initial question.

“Why not go sit with them?”

“You know very well why.”

“Yes, I know, but it’s not your fault. You are not your grandfather, or your father. You should not be an outcast for no reason. They have no right. They only hate you for your blood; that’s a pitiful reason to hate anyone.”

“You’re biased.”

“I’m honest.” Yamaguchi sighs, a violent, shuddering thing, and continues, “It rained today for the first time in, what, two years? Does that bring you nothing but grief? Of all the nights, tonight should be the one when you’re most unafraid, but instead you shrink into this corner like a beaten animal! Don’t you see how they celebrate? (He points again to the drunks.) They only hate you for what you stand for. They forget your ancestry’s sins as soon as the sky clouds over! You are not samurai, there is no bushido you are bound to.”

“My grandfather—“

“…Was a corrupt man, a traitorous warrior. But you are not him. This passive lifestyle you lead is very unfitting of anyone, much less a young man of great potential. Do you not think you’re more than the sum of your parts?”

Both of their eyes are too shiny in the lamplight where they sit, but only Yamaguchi lets his tears fall.

Outside, the rain beats away on rooftops, unrelenting.


	3. Of Debt and Indecision

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please note: This story will won't end in tragedy, but there are elements of violence and death throughout. As mentioned in the tags, there are no graphic descriptions of these things, but please take care of yourself by not reading this fic if you think those elements will be triggering for you.
> 
> Two chapters posted in one day, wooooo!! This won't happen often, but I felt bad for posting Chapter Two on a Sunday instead of a Friday like I planned. This chapter was super fun to write, so I hope you enjoy reading it! Here we get some much-needed backstory on Hinata's life, and we meet Yachi! I promise Kageyama will come into this story soon, since this is primarily a Kagehina fic, but it'll be a few more chapters before we properly meet him. :)

“Tell me how the story goes again.”

Both Yamaguchi and Hinata have heavy eyelids by this time, a few hours after they first sat down at the isolated table, Hinata’s gaze slipping from fatigue, the others from inebriation. The apothecary observes the older boy with hazy eyes, but begins his storytelling nonetheless. He stumbles over the first few sentences, restarting a few times before the words find their place in his mouth. He has told this tale too many times to truly forget it, even in his drunkenness.

Hinata breathes in the sharp smell of alcohol and cut wood, and lets another world be painted before his eyes.

\---

“Once upon a time, as it goes, there was a great warrior who lived very near to this island, in a town not unlike this one. His talents were unrecognized by none, and he personally was entrusted with protecting the emperor many times over. He had fought in many a war, won many a battle with only his wits and his trust in the men behind him. He was a true samurai, well-trained in the art of bushido.

“His name was Kageyama Nobukane, and this is not the story of his glory. This is the story of his untimely death. 

“While Kageyama was well-loved within the spheres of his influence, there was another, the shadow to his brilliance, if you will, who was regarded with a healthy sense of unease. As a shadow, this man’s darkness lengthened and blackened as Kageyama’s light grew ever more intense. He was samurai as well, also properly-trained in the art of bushido, but he paid no mind to its restrictions and regulations, only allowing them to kindle the fire of his bitterness towards the shogunate.

“He was Hinata Nishio—your grandfather, Hinata—and he sought revenge on the very foundations of our country because he was born into the role of a warrior. His father was samurai, and his father before that, and so it was only natural at the time that Nishio was to be conceived and raised for the sole purpose of defending his nation. And so Nishio did study. He studied bushido and he studied weaponry and he studied combat and he studied many things he should not have, and when he considered himself a decent master of these things he slayed his parents in their sleep for taking away a childhood free of service and pain and loyalty to an emperor he would never meet.

“Soon after, Nishio met Nobukane, a man he considered to be of many words but few actions. Nishio was already mad by this time, driven from sanity by hatred and hardened by his experiences at war. He took every step on tiptoes and blew out every candle at night lest someone find him by their light. He seethed in the background of every place there was warmth and laughter, riddled with contempt and paranoia. The townspeople knew of him but never spoke his name, too afraid of the weight it carried, of a man who had lost his very Self. And Kageyama, to Nishio, was brimming with Self, so jubilant and genuine that it had to be faked, so much an imposter that it had to be overlooked.

“And so Nishio killed Kageyama, and so the village Miyagi was cursed to cruel misfortune by the gods because the sacred code of bushido had been broken within it, and so a young boy whose grandfather’s name had been forced upon him and whose fault was not his but his ancestry’s was made to suffer. Fin.”

“Fin?”

“Fin, as in, like, it’s finished. It’s over; that’s the story.”

“That’s it, huh? Forced to endure a curse for forever, destined to be an outcast. Is that what I am?”

“ _I_ don’t think so, but you seem to.”

Hinata casts his eyes downward and pulls his lower lip into his mouth. “History thinks so.” A pause. “What if I moved?”

“The curse would probably follow you. It’s your family that’s cursed, not the island.”

“Well, can’t I get it removed?”

“Get what removed?”

“The curse, what else?!”

Yamaguchi looks at him with more amusement than is necessary for such a dire matter. “You’ll have to talk to the universe about that.”

 

When Yamaguchi leaves the tavern, it is under the assault of a thick sheet of rain, with Hinata following soon after.

\---

When Hinata wakes the next morning, after another night of routinely uneasy rest, it is to the vision of every one of his room’s belongings now colored the same shade of jade as Tobio’s kimono as it appears in his dream, which is just _perfect_ , really. Hinata knows the objects will eventually fade back into their intended colors, like the odor from two nights before disappeared until only the faintest trace of it remained, but that does not mollify him in the slightest. He pulls on garments that do not appear to be too violently stained, scrubs under his arms with the remaining bathwater in his basin, fixes himself some lukewarm miso soup for breakfast, and begins his trek to the metalsmith’s forge across town.

Today is a Thursday, which means many things. It means haggling with customers from behind a counter with an inlaid glass display, trying to convince them to pay mainland prices for some cheap china set. It means feeling the heft of coins in his palms, hearing them jingle as he pushes them into piles and counts. It means slaving over fire and heated metal; it means waking up the next morning stiff with soreness. It means maybe having enough money to buy a nice pile of rice cakes at the end of the day. But most of all, it means seeing Yachi.

The door of the smith’s shop squeals when Hinata shoves at it, long overdue for an oiling. The shop itself is long overdue for _something_ ; the paint’s chipped beyond what a new coat will fix; spider webs weave their way around the tiles and pillars in an intricate mosaic, catching dust in their webbing and glistening with moistness when the light hits them; there are splintered tables and cloudy oil lamps and blueprints with tea-stained corners. In the middle of it all, hair messily-thrown back and fingers painted with grease, is a girl, as much a part of the landscape as everything else. Unlike Yamaguchi, she does not instinctually sense his presence, so Hinata gets to observe her twist her fingers in the cloth of her haori, soiling the fabric further, and brush her fingers across the bridge of her nose, trailing grease in their wake. It is a motion Hinata greets with familiarity, working as he does in the paddy fields day in and day out. (There are too many days when mud smeared across his cheeks, unbeknownst to him, invites the children’s snickers in the streets.)

Hinata steps further into the shop, rapping his knuckles lightly across the wood of the doorframe so as not to disconcert Yachi. Unlike Yamaguchi, Hinata finds no enjoyment in teasing Yachi that way; his stomach has too often been a victim of her swinging punches when she startles and his ears too often a victim of her screeches.  

She looks up from her work—a copper pot badly pocked on one side—and her greeting is as warm as the summers that never seem to arrive soon enough.

“It’s been a long time, hasn’t it?” she greets him.

Hinata laughs, pure and delighted. “I was here last week.”

She hums in contemplation, fingers twisted to cradle her chin in a dramatic display of thought. “Yes, but so much has happened since last week. Yamaguchi is back now, isn’t he? And this horrible pitter-patter has started up on my roof in the past few hours; I can’t do a thing with this much noise.”

Hinata snorts, tries to pass it off as a particularly enthusiastic sneeze, and fails.

“That’s rain, Yachi. It’s been raining for the past few days, not a few hours. Maybe if you’d slept the past three nights you would’ve known.”

“Sleep is for people who actually need it.”

“That doesn’t even make any sense!”

She sends a pout his way and turns her attention back to the pot. He turns to find a project to work on for the day, a meager excuse for the generous pay Yachi will give him as the afternoon draws to a close, but she tosses instructions over her shoulder before he can disrupt any of her workspace. “There’s something in the back for you to work on. We got a new commission from a boy; she wants a small knife. ‘Shouldn’t be too difficult of a project for you to work on. I’ve already forged the rough spine and blade edges. I just want you to taper, bevel, and anneal the knife, please. That’s all for today.”

“Got it, boss.”

The blade is waiting for him in the back of the forge, more a crudely shaped metal than a real weapon at this point. When he finishes his work—a light workload today, not enough to make his bones tremble in exhaustion and his eyes sting with sweat—there will still be much left to do. It will not be a proper dagger until a few days later, when the steel has been broken and healed many times over, hammered in on itself and filed to lethality.

It is entrancing, in a way, even in its crude form as it sits now; Hinata feels the sudden, tugging compulsion to slice his finger across its edge, let his blood water its own bloodlust that is the purpose of its creation. The urge pulls at his gut, writhing in his stomach hotly.

Hinata breathes in shakily, rolls his shoulders back with purpose, and begins hammering at the metal to taper it at its head.

This labor is methodical, therapeutic in its blandness. It reminds Hinata of younger days (days freer of the burden that his existence carried with it, days where the debt he had to pay was not his grandfather’s but his own), of molding clay straight from the earth with his chubby, toddler hands, sculpting tiny figures with the dirt. Before long, the sun has already begun to set, the chill brought with it stinging his fingertips more so than the cool steel under his palms.

The evening is approaching, and with it the prospect of honeyed rice cakes. 

\---

Yachi is working on smithing a simple set of cutlery when he finds her again, her soft humming the accompanying orchestra to the cicadas chittering outside.

“Hey,” Hinata says gently, and she responds in kind. She stands up then, brushing past Hinata to place the silverware in a pile off to the side, continuing on to the back of the shop to scoop together a generous handful of coins. They clink in her palms as she carries them back to Hinata and lets them waterfall into his cupped hands.

“Some food stalls should still be open, if you walk fast enough,” she says, and her eyes are gentle when she glances up at him. “I’ll see you soon.” She stretches up to press her lips against his cheek, and the echo of her touch tingles afterwards.

\---

Hinata steps out of the smith’s shop, and the first thing he sees is blood.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for leaving it on a cliffhanger until next week. All will be revealed soon *fingerguns and mysteriously slides away into the distance*...


	4. Of Visions and Vengeance

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Just a quick warning in regards to this chapter: this chapter has descriptions of violence, vomiting, and minor character death (it's not any of the Haikyuu!! characters though, it's just a random dude), so please be careful if you find any of those topics triggering for you. I can't give a specific point of the chapter where the violence begins and ends, since it's pretty prevalent throughout the chapter, so if you don't feel comfy reading this chapter at all, feel free to contact me through my Tumblr (allthemilkbreads.tumblr.com) for a brief description of the chapter's plot so you can continue following along with the story.

There is blood, slithering towards him from every direction, staining the tips of his sandals crimson. Hinata makes a helpless noise, voice catching in his throat, breath coming short. He opens his mouth to scream and gags instead, folding in on himself, retching, palms slapping the ground as he falls to his knees. The blood gurgles wetly as his hands land in it. The smell is rancid, stinging his nostrils in all its coppery bitterness. 

Hinata kneels, heaving, eyes unfocused, in the sea of blood for an indiscriminate amount of time—seconds maybe, minutes possibly. He wonders, distantly, how many people have died. Yamaguchi. Tobio. He knows Yachi is still alive, still behind the door at his back.

There are cherry blossoms in the thick clots of blood that cling to his skin. The _sakura_ , from the mainland. They are red, like everything else, tiny dots of grotesque beauty.

Hinata stands in a flowering graveyard.

He does not have anything in his stomach to vomit up, but he does so anyway, scrapes over his mouth with the back of a bloodied hand. The door is a steady press at his back, and he grasps for it with a weak grip, vision blurry with tears. He throws his weight against the entrance, stumbling inside the forge. A rush of hot air hits him in the face when he staggers past the doorframe.

“Oh my god, Hinata, what happened?!”

There’s at least one survivor besides him. (Good.)

“Your hands are all red…is it blood? Are you injured?”

She must not know what’s happened.

He swallows down another rush of rising bile and tries to collect himself. His voice betrays him when he speaks.

“Y-Yachi, th-there’s—something’s happened. Stay. Here. In the forge. I need you to give me a weapon.”

“A weapon—what?”

Hinata glances around, still panicked, heart still a fluttering bird in his chest, sees the crude blade he was smithing earlier, and snatches it with unsure hands.

“Hinata, please.” Her eyes are searching and concerned.

_Damn it, he does_ not _need concern; he needs her sharpest blade and her promise to stay safe._

Hinata’s nostrils flare, the weight of the blade steady and reassuring in his hands. Anger will do nothing for him, but it rushes through his bloodstream anyways. Maybe it’s just the adrenaline finally kicking in, now that he has been given a fighting chance, but whatever it is, it courses hot and impatient through him. He feels like a live wire; it is a feeling he has become acquainted with ever since the dreams started, and it’s no different this time. He’s just woken up, unnerved and sweat-soaked, but this time the dream doesn’t end when the night does. The feeling does not ebb away within a few seconds.

“Yachi, you don’t get it. Listen to me. There was blood everywhere; there has been a massacre in town. Can’t you _smell_ it? It reeks like metal and death out there. You need to stay here.”

“Hinata, I don’t understand.”

He growls, an animalistic sound that reverberates in his chest and surprises even his own ears when it tears out of his throat without his commanding it to do so. What more is there to say? What words does he need to find to make her understand?

He flings open the door to the forge, and sees—

 

Nothing.

He sees nothing.

He sees a flat expanse of grass, with the town’s center in the distance, still intact. A thin trail of smoke twists upwards from an undifferentiated building. All is still and silent. Most notably, there is no sea of blood.

And yet… Hinata brings his hands to his face, examining their surface with purpose. There is blood crusted under his fingernails. His palms have been painted an all-too-similar shade of red. He glances out the door again. No blood. No sticky sakura petals. None of this eases Hinata’s sense of impending doom, but it does succeed in making him feel a fool for housing its presence.

“Hinata, are you feeling alright?”

“I’m fine, thanks. Must’ve been… just a bad vision.”

Yachi hums in interest. “You’re still having bad dreams and the like?”

“’Hasn’t gotten any better.”

“Have you maybe considered telling Yamaguchi about them? I couldn’t hope to know you as well as he does. If anyone could help, it’d be him.”

“I would’ve told him sooner, if he wasn’t always away.”

She gives him a sympathetically concerned look, mouth twisted downwards and brows knitted. He despises it, this pity. “He has to leave sometimes, you know. No one else would be as good at his job as he is.”

“I know!” He sighs, frustration tangled in his throat. “All I meant is, I didn’t have time to tell him about it before. Plus, I didn’t want to worry him. He has a lot on his plate. I’ll get around to mentioning it soon.”

The concern has distorted her features again, just as unwelcome as before. “I think that’d be good.”

 

Hinata takes the blade with him into town. His stomach still hasn’t settled, no matter how often he checks behind him only to see what is supposed to be there. He feels juvenile again, a child with no sense of the world who stays up late mongering fear of monsters in his room, who sees shadowy figures dance in the corners of his vision because of it. Yachi must know he’s brought the blade; he wasn’t very discreet about the way he gripped it tightly with sweat-slicked hands when he left the forge, but nonetheless she turned a blind eye, probably blinded by her _concern_.

“This is why I haven’t told Yamaguchi,” Hinata spits under his breath as the village bobs back into his sight again. He isn’t as soft as they all seem to think him.

His sandals hit the dirt with more force than strictly necessary on his next step, a rock underfoot piercing through the thin, wooden soles of his shoe, and he hisses out a noise of pain.

He is not soft; he will not give in.

He grits his teeth in resolution and keeps going, rock scraping across the soft underbelly of his foot with every step, Hinata determinedly not fixing it.

He takes a few more pounding steps. He checks behind him. There is nothing but the wind. A few more steps. Another paranoid glance. The wind presses against his back when he starts forward once more, howling as it moves through the underbrush. He whips around again at a faint sound to his right, and he does not know what he expects to find, but whatever it is, it is absent. The craggy earth he treads over turns gradually to smooth stone paving as he nears the town. In a distance, a young boy runs barefoot across the fields after some small animal, his stubby arms outstretched, his gargled noises of amusement barely audible.

Hinata turns one more time, just for good measure, to check behind him, feeling a great idiot for it but unable to dismiss the feeling of unease. Nothing.

He faces forward, and there is a man in front of him.

And then a strange thing happens, followed by a succession of stranger things.

  1. The man, face cloaked and daunting, reaches towards him. His eyes gleam coldly. There is a flash of metal in his fist. Hinata’s mind is struggling through a fog, a moment behind his hands, a moment behind the man’s hands.
  2. There is a hot, stinging pain, pulsing in his cheek. The knife glints again in the older man’s fist, now dipped in red. The man’s coat shifts; a sword hangs from his hip. Hinata’s crude bladed metal weighs as a reminder in his fist, reflecting poorly in the evening light as it cuts through the air, still unpolished and unfit to sell.
  3. Blood.
  4. A limp body crumples on the stone, cooling and lifeless under Hinata’s ministrations, as he presses frantic fingers to the man’s pulse, presses an ear to his chest to bear witness to the lack of heartbeat. The small knife is still lodged in the man’s chest like an axe in a tree. It’s in there up to the hilt, and Hinata has to lean his weight onto the carcass to unstick the weapon. It slides out with little resistance and a wet _pop_.



Hinata does not cry or vomit or scream or tremble, but as the knife slips from his weak grip onto the ground beside him, now red like in his vision, he thinks fate must be very cruel. How very, very cruel, that he be the one to craft his own murder weapon unknowingly. How merciless to take away his only excuse, that he did not know the capabilities of his own armament.

Hinata has seen death through the eyes of the nearly-affected and grief-ridden his whole life. He has seen it in the streets, in sickly mothers nursing starving children, giving them an extra piece of bread in sacrifice of their own health. He has seen in his sleep, seen a boy parachuted by a river of inky hair as he falls over and over, succumbing to the same fate every night. He has seen it in his own eyes sometimes, when he glances in mirrors and puddles before arranging his expression in one of health.

Hinata has seen death all his life, but now it is staring back at him with unfocused, unblinking brown eyes.

He has never stayed to watch Tobio’s body shatter on the bottom of the well in his dreams, but now he knows he will not have to for him to picture every detail impeccably.


	5. Of Misery and Meetings

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As always, thanks for reading! Enjoy!

The village is a ghost town when Hinata steps into it. He turns corners, and the silence is palpable, ebbing around his blood-stained sandals and washing over him in waves. Sometimes, when he jerks around too fast, he can hear poorly-disguised whispers that drain and flow with the turn of his head; only when they think he is out of earshot do they start up again.

It is still raining, as it has been for what feels like forever now, and its endless onslaught has, by now, drowned out the festivities and raucous cheer that so adamantly accompanied it when it arrived; now, the villagers have stopped going outside to praise the skies and have resigned themselves to retreating indoors to whisper fearfully and pray for the survival of the crops. The droplets make the blood in Hinata’s hair slide down his neck and into the collar of his kimono. He wonders if it is the horrific, red painting that he makes that drives the village into the safety of their homes, or something else.

A curtain rustles as he passes by it, the wide eyes of a child falling back behind the sheet of cloth just as he takes notice of them. Bodies lay in wait, shrouded by the shadow of doorways, their faces becoming black masks flattened by the veil of darkness. He is sure their lips are downturned, even if he cannot make them out. Are they sheltering themselves, he wonders, from the boy who wrought misfortune or the rain that catered to his needs, or another evil?

Hinata is familiar with their ostracism, but not their fear; it pricks at him, digging into the back of his neck and shoulders like needle-thin spearheads.

He turns a few more corners, passes through the gaze of a few more curious eyes and swipes his fingers absently through the grime smeared across an alleyway wall as he walks alongside it (it is sticky, wet, and vile; he wishes his hands would not move without his mind’s consent sometimes.)

When he turns the next corner, it is to be met with the unwelcome presence of a group of men—large men. They huddle in the street, down a ways, hulking and clothed entirely in black. Their voices carry poorly in the soggy air, and the hum as they spin indistinguishable words sounds gravelly and unfamiliar. Hinata can recognize a foreigner with ease when he spots one, but it would take a blind man not to notice the threat of the mainland these men carry with them in the posture of their shoulders and the detailing of their silks.

The young boy molds himself against the wall where he is around the corner and out of sight, hands outstretched to grip the cold stone behind them and fingers fanned out. The wet coldness is steady behind him, but altogether not reassuring. After a moment of taut silence, broken only by Hinata’s harsh inhales, ragged and loud to his own ears, he risks a glance beyond the corner again. When he does so, eyes like steel, set behind heavily hooded lids, stare back at him.

The gasp that rips through the boy’s throat as he again flattens himself against the wall must be audible, but he can barely hear it over the sound of his own blood rushing through his body, roaring as it crashes through his ears, crawls up his throat and makes its presence known in the roof of his mouth, washing over him and making him beat and throb to its rhythm. A small voice lost somewhere in the all-consuming panic says that maybe it was an accident, that the man was looking at something in the distance, off behind his shoulder, but the voice is meek and tinny, and easily ignored. Hinata feels like a live wire again, for the third time in less than an hour, feels something pulsating under the skin of his fingertips, but he has no desire to act upon the sensation. He does not want to fight these men; he wants to go home, to become nothing more than one of the shadowed silhouettes peering out from behind second-story windows.

Hinata squeezes his eyes shut, spots of color blossoming and popping on the backs of his eyelids, and wishes for the man to not have noticed him.

The universe grants him no such luck.

As his heartbeat finishes ripping across his ears and settles back into his chest, he can again make out the grumbles of the men, and then the sound of their approach. They are altogether too leisurely in their advance, already sure of victory. Hinata finds despairingly that he thinks this well-justified. 

 

There is no courage to draw from this time.

There is nowhere to go, no use in fighting with the odds he has been dealt. Better to resign himself to his fate than destine himself to a worse one. He has lived a cowardly life, and he will die a coward, his back pressed fearfully to this wall as it has been all his life. It is a fitting end.

He thinks of Yamaguchi, with his lively smile and sharp wit and trips to the mainland, and wishes he could have had a chance to properly say goodbye.

He thinks of Yachi, and her gentle touches and soothing words and metalsmith’s hands, and wishes he could have been something more in his life.

He thinks of his samurai grandfather and his wrongdoings, and wishes he could have righted of those wrongs, or at least been given the time to try.

His body locks up, posture frozen in a flinch, back hunched and head tucked away between two shaking shoulders, so that maybe if his luck rings true (it never does) they will miss his throat and strike his arms instead.  He closes his eyes, and he waits.

 

And waits.

Nearby, one of the mainland men says a phrase Hinata has never heard before in a voice that sounds like the messy scrape of metal kissing metal, his voice catching over the words at the end and the cracked rasping falling away into a breathy laugh.

Somewhere, a child’s sniffles erupt into a fit of wailing.

Hinata’s neck begins to ache from where it’s twisted and shoved back into his spine. His heartbeat has already begun to settle from being left to wait for so long; the adrenaline in his veins slides back to where it came from, unneeded. He wonders how long he will be made to wait like this, if the men had even seen him at all. But there is nowhere to go regardless. Even if they aren’t coming for him, he would have to pass by the alleyway where they lay in wait in order to get home, which would guarantee a sure and painful death.

No, that is not an option. (That is barely a bad imitation of an option.)

After a few more seconds of stillness, the thud of sandals falling heavy against stone distinctively absent from the air, Hinata lets one eye slip open.

 

A figure drops from the sky with the raindrops, falling from the rooftop where they crouched with catlike ease, blue fabric pillowing around them and then sagging into the shape of the figure again as the ground rushes up to meet them and they roll into a crouch. Even in the bad lighting, Hinata can make out blue eyes glinting dangerously, flashing from behind a curtain of sable hair.

Hinata knows those eyes all too well.

One of the men lets out a shout, and a maelstrom of noise and motion explodes in response.

As the first of the men charges him, Tobio picks himself up from the ground, draws a tantō from the fabric of his obi, and strikes with all the force of the sky breaking open. The first of his attackers crumples unnaturally to the cobblestones before Hinata even blinks, the man’s own sword pushed deep within the shallow dip of space between his brows. The next man falls under the weight of a bare foot swinging around to meet him in the side of the neck, and he twists and slumps into Tobio’s arms, unconscious, before he casts the limp body aside and moves to meet the next wave of attackers with steel and fists. Tobio fights wildly, _dirtily_ some would say, with reckless abandon and no sense of honor, using his opponents against each other, taking human shields and ducking between men well over his height and three times his weight so they crash headfirst into their own allies. He makes fools of each and every one of them, letting them wage war on each other until they corner him again, letting them circle around him just so he can fold over backwards and swing his blade through their guts. Tobio contorts, leaping from one space to another faster than the eye can follow, both here and there all at once, a streak of blue against grey canvas.

One by one, all the men collapse or flee, until only Tobio stands in their wake, sword tucked away once again beneath folds of fabric, his hair messy and his chest heaving and his hands unshaking. The darkness of the stormy sky casts his silhouette into sharp relief.

Hinata pushes off the wall as the others eyes trail over him. He’s sure he looks like quite a sight, eyes blown white and wide and mouth struggling to close, but he finds that he can’t quite bring himself to care, because, after all:

“Y-you’re him. You’re Tobio.”

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you so much for reading! 
> 
> Please leave kudos or comments if you enjoyed, as I would love to hear your feedback, and come visit me at allthemilkbreads.tumblr.com for lots of enthusiastic Haikyuu posts and fanart!


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